


Sustenance

by RogueLioness



Series: Thedosian Tales [9]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 07:19:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14995706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RogueLioness/pseuds/RogueLioness
Summary: His dreams were a beautiful torture.





	Sustenance

His dreams were torture. **  
**

No matter how hard he tried to stay away from her, he was always pulled in. Her sorrow, her fear, her desolation rippled the Fade like a waves on a stormy sea, but they were not what drew him in. It was the hope that bloomed within her breast, the determination and the perseverance that was the siren’s song that he could not ignore.

Was it because he lacked in them, and wished to have a glimpse of them, even if it were not his own?

Night after night he watched her from a distance as her mind spun dreams both heartbreakingly beautiful and terrible. He saw her sleeping mind refuse to accept the loss of an arm; and it cut him deeply, in a place within him he thought did not exist, when the day came where her form in the Fade reflected what it was in the waking world.

It haunted him when he was awake.

When he met with his agents, each time he wondered -  _would what he planned bring about her end?_

Each time he prayed, with a desperation he did not think he was capable of, that she was safe.

How was he to have known that he would find, in this shadow of a world, someone who could banish the loneliness that dogged his every breath?

_An enemy can end you, but an ally can betray you. Betrayal is always worse._

Yet for all that he’d done to her, she still believed in him.

She still _loved_  him.

It should have been impossible. That she did, was a kind of madness in itself.

What kind of person would love a monster?

Apparently, she was. A tiny slip of a woman, whose bones he could have broken with just a touch. A woman who constantly defied everything life threw at her. A woman who _would. not. yield._

Even death was hard-pressed to conquer her spirit.

But he - he, who they called Betrayer, he who her kind feared - he had brought her low when countless others had failed.

And amidst all that, she had stood firm and declared, with certainty and strength -  _var lath vir suledin_.

He hoped it would.

He  _prayed_  it would.

And each night, as he slept… he was reminded of it, and that reminder was both sweet panacea and bitter agony.

It sustained him.

It soothed him.

And the night when he drifted into slumber and realized, with a finality that numbed him, that she was no longer there…

… was the night the Dread Wolf  _truly_  died.


End file.
